My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office ... - Monoskop

SOCIAL CLASS 39
and almost indecipherable niche in the social hierarchy. They were “information
workers” and “technicians” well before these familiar late twentiethcentury
job classifications existed, making attempts to discuss them in
nineteenth-century terms particularly elusive. As Edwin Gabler notes in his
1988 study The American Telegrapher, “Nothing comparable to telegraphy
existed before the mid-nineteenth century.” 2
For most operators in the United States, telegraphy was a social means,
rather than an end in itself; the occupation was often presented in the trade
journals and in the reminiscences of telegraphers as a means of advancing or
improving one’s station in life. The names of such famous men as Thomas
Edison and Andrew Carnegie were often invoked as examples of those who
had risen from humble beginnings to exalted positions thanks to time spent
in the telegraph office. Though less frequently and less visibly, women
telegraphers also shared in this Horatio Algeresque vision, as when Western
Union’s Journal of the Telegraph referred in 1869 to Lydia H. (Lizzie) Snow,
manager of the City Department of the New York Western Union office, as
“a competent instructor . . . who had risen by steady steps to the very front
rank of American telegraphers.” 3
Like their male counterparts, women telegraphers were an important
part of the new upwardly mobile lower middle class. The term “middle
class,” though, had vastly different connotations for its members in the midnineteenth
century than it does today. For them, the term implied newness
and a modern outlook; for women in particular, it suggested the possibility
for education, independent living, and meaningful work outside of the
home.
Alexander H. Bullock, former governor of Massachusetts, conveyed the
mid-nineteenth-century sense of this term, especially as it applied to
women, in a speech he delivered at Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1876, entitled
“The Centennial Situation of Woman”:
In periods when there were only the gentlewoman and the lowborn
woman, the one was indeed maintained by the other, but
the one also belonged to the other, or to the master of both; and
self-dependence, whether ideal or actual, was as unknown as
the electric telegraph. In the progress of time the uprising of a
middle class, and the introduction of shop-keeping and textile